September 30, 2006

I just got done reading 'The Culture Code' by Clotaire Rapaille. Overall, I though the book was really good. Its obvious that he understands the human brain, how it functions and how the subconscious drives most of what we say and do. It's a book about marketing/branding, but it is also a book that is about better understanding human behavior.

The quote at the opening of the book sums it all up:

"We are all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer"

~ Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

Here is my summary of the book... (I'll skip blockquoting the whole thing, for easier reading - only one comment from me in the summary, denoted by [JMS])

[BEGIN SUMMARY]

The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing - a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country - via the culture in which we're raised. The American experience with Jeeps is very different from the French and German experience because our cultures evolved differently (we have strong cultural memories of the open frontier; the French and German have strong cultural memories of occupation and war). Therefore, the Codes - the meanings we give to the Jeep at an unconscious level - are different as well. What most people don't realize is that these differences actually lead to our processing the same information in different ways.

Henri Laborit drew a clear connection between learning and emotion, he showed that the latter without the former was impossible. The stronger the emotion, the more clearly an experience is learned. Think of a child told by his parents to avoid a hot pan on a stove. This concept is abstract to a child until he reaches out, touches the pan, and it burns him. In this intensely emotional moment of pain, the child learns what "hot" and "burn" mean and is very unlikely to ever forget it.

The combination of the experience and its accompanying emotion creates something known widely as an imprint, a term first applied by Konrad Lorenz. Once an imprint occurs, it strongly conditions our thought process and shapes our future actions. Each imprint helps make us more of who we are. The combination of imprints define us... every imprint influences us on an unconscious level.

There are five principles for uncovering cultural Codes:

Principle 1: You can't believe what people say
What do Americans look for in a car? I've heard many answers when I've asked this question. The answers include excellent safety ratings, great gas mileage, handling, and corning abilities, among others. I don't believe any of these. That's because the first principle of the Culture Code is that the only effective way to understand what people mean is to ignore what they say. That is not to suggest that people intentionally lie or misrepresent themselves. What it means is that, when asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. Again, this is not because they intend to mislead. It is because people respond to these questions with their cortexes, the parts of their brain that control intelligence rather than emotion or instinct. They ponder a question, process the question, and when they deliver an answer, it is the product of deliberation. They believe they are telling the truth. A lie detector would confirm this. In most cases, however, they aren't saying what they mean.

The reason for this is simple: most people don't know why they do the things they do.

In a classic study, the nineteenth-century scientist Jean-Martin Charcot hypnotized a female patient, handed her an umbrella and asked her to open it. After this, he slowly brought her out of the hypnotic state. When she came to, she was surprised by the object in her hand. Charcot then asked her why she was carrying an open umbrella indoors. The woman was utterly confused by the question. She of course had no idea of what she had just been through and no memories of Charcot's instructions. Baffled, she looked at the ceiling and. Then she looked at Charcot and said, "It was raining".

Surely the woman didn't think she had an open umbrella indoors because it was raining. When asked, though, she felt the need to come up with an answer, and this was the only logical one she could devise. Even the most self-examining of us are rarely in close contact with our subconscious. We have little interaction with this powerful force that drives so many of our actions. Therefore, we give answer to questions that sound logical and are even what the questioner expected, but which don't reveal the unconscious forces that precondition our feelings. This is why polls and surveys are so often misleading and useless. They simply reflect what people say, rather than what they mean.

[JMS] - people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The heart has reasons that reason doesn't know about. The peril of introspection problem (The poster test). Etc.

Principle 2: Emotion is the energy required to learn anything
Emotions are the keys to learning, the keys to imprinting. The stronger the emotion, the more clearly the experience is learned. Think again of the child and the hot pan. Emotions create a series of mental connections (I call them mental highways) that are reinforced by repetition. These mental connections condition us to see the world in predictable ways. They are the path from our experience with the world (such as touching a hot pan) to a useful approach to the world (avoiding all hot things in the future).

We do an overwhelming majority of our learning when we are children. By the time we are seven, most of our mental connections have been constructed. But emotion continues to provide us with new imprints throughout our lives.

Principle 3: The structure, not the content, is the message
In the play Cyrano De Bergerac, by Edward Rostand, Cyrano has a dramatic swordfight. The Cyrano story was retold in the 1987 movie Roxanne starring Steve Martin. Martins character, C.D. Bales, has a similar encounter, but he uses a tennis racket. When one is looking for unconscious messages, the difference between swords and tennis rackets is irrelevant. They are merely the content. One can tell the same story with either a sword or a tennis racket, which means that the content isn't essential to meaning. You could say that West Side Story, whose "content" is different from Romeo & Juliet's but which tells the same tale.

What is important is the story's structure, the connection between the different elements. For both Cyrano and C.D., the fight is about defending honor. The need that leads to the fight is the important thing to identify, and it is the same in the two stories, even with different trappings.

One can say the same thing about a melody. You can play the same melody in the morning or in the evening, on a piano or a violin, in the summer or the winter. The performers may be young or old, rich or poor, male or female. Even the notes are largely irrelevant, because a melody played in a different key or at a different octave is still the same melody. All the aforementioned elements are the content. The structure is the space between the notes, the range between each note and its successor, and the rhythm.

The key to understanding the true meanings behind our actions is to understand the structure. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss studied kinship, saying that he was not interested in people but in the relationships between them, the "space between people". An uncle does not exist if there is no niece, a wife if there is no husband, a mother if there is no child. Kinship is the structure. When looking at why people act in certain ways or do certain things, we need to look past the content and into the structure. In any situation, there are three distinct structures in action. The first is the biological structure, the DNA. Monkeys, human beings, cows and giraffes are made of the same content. However, each species is unique because of the organization of its DNA - its structure - is unique. The next structure is culture. All cultures have a language, an art, a habitat, a history, and so on: the way all these elements, this content is organized creates the unique identity of each culture. The final structure is the individual. Within the DNA that makes us human there is infinite variety. Further, each of us has a unique relationship with our parents, siblings, and family that shapes our individual mental scripts and creates our unique identities.

Principle 4: There is a window in time for imprinting, and the meaning of the imprint varies from one culture to another
I like to say that you never get a second chance to have a first experience. Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children under the age of seven (if you need proof of this, watch how often a young child's emotional state changes in a single hour), while after this, they are guided by logic (again, try arguing with a nine-year old). Most people are exposed to only one culture before the age of seven. They spend most of their time at home or within their local environment. Few young Americans are exposed in any meaningful way to Japanese culture. Few Japanese children are exposed to Irish culture. Therefore, the extremely strong imprints placed in their subconscious at this early age are determined by the culture in which they are raised.

Principle 5: To access the meaning of an imprint within a particular culture, you must learn the code for that imprint
Even our most arbitrary actions are the result of the trips we take down our mental highways. We take these trips hundreds of times a day, making decisions about what to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to do, what to say in conversation, and so on. What most people don't realize, however, is that there is a Code required to make these journeys. Think of the code as a combination that unlocks a door. In this case, we need not only punch in the numbers, but also to punch them in in a specific order, at a specified speed, with a specified rhythm, etc. Every word, action, symbol has a Code. Our brains supply these codes subconsciously, but there is a way to discover them, to understand why we do the things we do. When my staff and I analyze participant responses from the discovery sessions we conduct, common messages emerge. We discover codes when we find these common messages. The messages vary greatly culture to culture, and, therefore, so do the codes.

An (edited, partial) example from the book:

Love...
American participants in the discovery sessions spoke repeatedly of the desire for love, the need for love, the belief in something called true love, but they also spoke consistently of being disappointed in this quest. A very large percentage of the "most recent memory" stories spoke of loss, bitterness, and sadness. Americans - regardless of age - view love the way an adolescent view the world: as an exciting dream that rarely reaches fulfillment.

The American Culture Code for Love is FALSE EXPECTATION.

Without question, losing at love is an international experience. Even in cultures where marriages are arranged and courtship is rare, there are tales of forbidden love and of the sad consequences when that love dies. In older cultures, though - ones that passed through adolescence centuries ago - the unconscious message about the expectations for love are very different.

In France, the concepts of love and pleasure are intertwined. The French consider the notions of true love and Mr. Right irrelevant. The refinement of pleasure is paramount, and romance is a highly sophisticated process. Love means helping your partner achieve as much pleasure as possible, even if this requires finding someone else to provide some of this pleasure. French couples can, of course, be devoted to each other, but their definition of devotion differs greatky from the American definition, and their expectations are set accordingly.

The Italians believe that life is a comedy rather than a tragedy and that one should laugh whenever possible. They expect love to contain strong dimensions of pleasure, beauty, and, above all, fun. If love becomes too hard, it is unsatisfying. The Italian culture centers very strongly on family, and Italians put their mothers up on pedestals. To them, true love is maternal love. Therefore, their expectations for romantic love are lower. Men romance women, but seek true love from their mothers. Women believe that they best way to express and experience love is by becoming mothers. A man is Mr. Right as long as he provides a child.

The Japanese offer perhaps the best illustration of the differences in attitudes toward love between an adolescent culture and an older culture. Japanese men and women often ask me to describe how Westerners marry. I tell them that a young man meets a young woman (often one younger than he) and they begin the process of getting to know each other. If he happens to fall deeply in love, the man will ask the woman to marry him, and if she loves him as well, she will say yes (obviously it is more complicated than this in practice, but I get the main point across this way). Stunned expressions always meet this description. "The man is young?" the Japanese questioner will say. "If he is young, how can he possibly have enough experience to make a decision of this type? Only his parents can know what kind of marriage is appropriate him and will allow him to raise the best family. And you say the woman is younger? That means she is even less experienced than he is!" They save their greatest contempt, though, for the notion that Westeners marry for love. "Love is a temporary disease", they tell me. "It is foolish to base something as important as creation of family on something so temporary". This is still the prevalent sensibility in Japan today, even though the "content" of the Japanese culture has changed. While Japanese teens might date more often than their parents did, and might spend more time meeting up at clubs, most marriages are still arranged and few have anything to do with romance. This might sound terribly harsh to American ears, but there is at least some logic in it: while nearly half of all American marriages end in divorce, the Japanese divorce rate is less than 2 percent.

July 23, 2006

Oddly enough, I think it is probably the longest of his books. Basically it is a "best of" his blog, eBooks and articles he's written.

There is a page at the front of the book that I love... it contains two simple things; How Dare You? and I Dare You.

I'll share the second, because I think it sums up what you already know you'll get from the book:

I DARE YOU
I dare you to read any ten of these essays and still be comfortable settling for what you've got. You don't have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, for getting by, for working all night.

If you're reading my blog, I can only assume that you read Seths blog... and you know from reading it that spending any time with his ideas are always thought-provoking and cause you to look at things from a different (and better) angle.

You don't have to buy this book... you can read it all free online (well, if you already have the eBooks), but that isn't the point. The point is that you can share this. I'll be passing this book around to the members of my team, just like I shared Big Red Fez and Purple Cow.

April 05, 2006

Mike points us to Rob over at BusinessPundit, whose looking for some suggestions on how to increase the exposure of the great book More Space. For those of you not familiar with the book, it is the wonderful brainchild of Todd (blog: A Penny For) - who invited nine great bloggers to contribute extended thoughts on business (he gave bloggers "more space"). It's a wonderful idea and it was executed beautifully.

Trouble is, it seems, that it isn't selling. What a shame. The essays in the book are fantastic.

So, I thought I would put on my thinking cap and come up with some ideas to spread the idea... I'm going to put one constraint on this, none of my ideas can require anything above a $10 dollar expense per item...

Have each of the authors go to their local Book Stores (borders, etc) - get them to carry the book and offer to do a reading. I've heard that even the chain book stores like to highlight local authors. They should go into the store and ask to talk to the store manager and find out what mutually beneficial arrangement can be worked out.

Have each of the authors go to the local chamber of commerce and similar local councils, offer to be a guest speaker. We have a local tech council that I've been involved in and even though the focus is on technology, the member companies are still business organizations. The chamber of commerce and other local entities like this should be fertile ground to plant a few local seeds of interest.

Send copies to book editors of their local papers, for review. Better yet, hand deliver the copy with a box of muffins. There are several people at the local paper that might be worthwhile speaking with; the business editor, since the focus of the book is business; the "arts" editor, since this is a book and most papers have at least some page dedicated to books (for us it is the Sunday paper, they have a review of a couple of books and the NY Times bestseller list), it seems every other week one of the books was written by a author from the region; the "metro/local" editor - perhaps it is a human interest story.

Send a copy to the local business paper - we have the Central PA Business Journal, that is always a great place to reach an audience of business people.

Schedule a reading at the local library and have them help market you - that is their job.

If you do any of these readings, find all the Calendar of Events for their local area and highlight the event.

Look for local chapters of the Fast Company Company of Friends, and offer to be a guest speaker for them - I know that Philadelphia has a vibrant group and usually have a guest speaker every month.

None of these are groundbreaking, obviously. They are all low cost means of increasing the exposure of an idea. Although these ideas are focused mostly on local efforts, I think that is the right place to start - the goal is to get other people talking about the book.

The More Space project is lucky in the sense that each of these activities are multiplied by the 9 authors - and if I'm not mistaken, they all live in different cities.

April 03, 2006

About a year ago I did my first true ethnographic study and I wanted to read everything I could about conducting the research and writing up the results. So, I sent a note over to Grant McCracken and asked for some recommendations. One of the books I ended up reading was one of his: 'The Long Interview'.

It's a short book, less than 100 pages, and it was worth EVERY penny - it offers practical, real-world advice that proved useful in that project as well as subsequent ones.

One of the interesting sections was about the Objectives & Strategies of Product Selection:

The objective in investigating a topic like product selection is to "get under" the commonplace view of the activity and see how the individual really sees and experiences it.

One way to set about systematically gathering information to do this is to think about the process as a dramatic production. You must determine what the important roles are, who will occupy these roles, how well the roles are enacted, who the director and prompter of the proceedings is, what the stage is, how the action is organized and scheduled, who the audience is, who the critics are, what is accomplished for actors and audience when the production goes well, what happens, on the other hand, when the production goes badly, what kind of things can go wrong, how they will be set right and son on.

Again, the object is to get past the formal and ordinary description of the event into the hidden social and cultural realities. For instance, it would be easy enough to go out and collect a set of statements about what Christmas is. Respondents are willing to trot out a set of conventional descriptions. Christmas is a time to celebrate a religious occasion, get together with family, exchange gifts and look back at the year. But this would not tell us anything about Christmas and it certainly would not justify the time, difficulty, and expense of qualitative investigation.

But the careful investigator through patient observation, intelligent questioning and active listening can learn much more. What he or she wants to do is determine some of the following questions: what activities make up Christmas, when does each of them start, who undertakes them, what part does gender play here; what does Christmas decoration do to the character of the home, how do people decide what to buy for one another; what are the consequences of a good gift and a bad one; how do families plan for their time together; what diplomatic preparations are made to make sure that people get along and “Grandpa Henry and Uncle Rupert don't get at one another this year"; how the nature of family interaction changes in the Christmas season; how does participating in the ritual and gift exchanges of Christmas have short-term and long-term consequences for how the family defines itself and gets along; what family activities are particular to the Christmas season; what difference will it make to the nature of family interaction if the activity is (1) watching a football game, (2) going for a walk in the country, (3) going to a movie; sometimes Christmas means that men spend more time around the house than usual, how do they respond; what do children learn about their families and their societies at Christmas; what special role do women play in organizing Christmas and family life at Christmas?

It is worth pointing out here that most of these questions cannot be asked directly. The can be answered only be asking other questions, and piecing answers together.

The most useful sections for me was about how to conduct an interview - something I never really thought that much about before I read the book. You ask some questions, write down the users replies. Simple enough, right? Wrong. The book contains a wonderful section on how to prepare for an interview and conducting the interview in such a way that does not prime or bias the user.

All in all it is a really good book. Some of the stuff seems like common sense, however, if you spend time gathering information from people through discussions, this book is well worth the time and money.

March 25, 2006

I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink. Overall it was a pretty good book. The setup wasn't anything unexpected since I read the wired article all those months ago.

The basic premise is that three factors will change which skills are considered valuable in the coming years: Abundance, Asia, and Automation.

Abundance - we don't "need" anything, purchases are now based primarily on "wants".

Asia - there will always be someone, somewhere who can do your job just as well, but cheaper, somewhere else in the world.

Automation - most of the rote, analytical, work that can be performed by computers, will be... and computers are only going to get smarter.

What this leads us towards is a world where people who have more Right-Brain skills - creators, empathizers, pattern-recognizers and meaning makers, these people, the artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers - will reap the societal rewards.

Mr. Pink suggests that there are six senses/skills that you need to thrive in the coming conceptual age: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.

He devotes a chapter to each of these six senses and closes the chapter with a portfolio of tools, ideas, and tips for you to improve that sense.

Here are just a couple of the tips/tools/ideas that I flagged:

Design - read design magazines. Some of the suggestions include Dwell, HOW, etc.

Story - get One Story, 18 times a year they send you a little book with exactly one story in it.

Symphony - (the ability to put all the pieces together) - Learn to draw. I'm going to do this and I'll share the results as I progress.

Empathy - voluteer, it is a great way to sharpen your empathic skills.

March 15, 2005

That is title of the new book by Seth Godin. Somehow, I'm still trying to figure this out, I was sent an advanced proof of the book.

What can I say, the book is true Seth. I liked it as much as Survival is Not Enough, which is still one my favorites of his.

If I had to sum up the book in a single statement, I'd use the following quote:

Just as nature abhors a vacum, so too does the human mind. Where there is a lack of information, the imagination will rush to fill a void.

~ Carl Jung

People prefer to be able to explain things, they want a logical explanation for everything that occurs. That includes all the details about the goods we purchase. If you don't provide people a story, they'll make one up - and more than likely, it won't be as good as one that you could come up.

One of my favorite stories in the book is the iPod shuffle story.

Everything happens for a reason, doesn't it? Even if you don't consciously agree with that statement, you brain sure does.

The ability to refine our superstitions is one of the brain's greatest talents. Unlike virtually any other living being (or even most computers), humans insist on finding a theory to explain what happens to them.

The New York Time recently ran an article about otherwise intelligent, rational people who were sure that the shuffle feature on their iPod was broken. The shuffle feature is supposed to randomly select songs and play them. These users knew for certain that something was wrong because their iPods appreared to keep playing certain songs over and over. Instead of being random, it appeared to these users that the iPod was favoring some songs over others.

A quick look at the song count on my iPod confirmed that this is exactly what happens - some songs are played ten times as often as others. But that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way randomness works. Random doesn't mean perfectly even. Far from it.

These supersititious iPod owners, though, had made a decision about what their player liked (and what it didn't like). They gave the machine a personality. Whenever a particular song came up again, they made a mental note of it. "Aha! See, it does love Fatboy Slim. There he is again." Of course, they were just as quick to ignore those instances when a rarely played song came up.

Overall the book is great. True Seth - thought provoking and very entertaining.

June 19, 2004

Of all the sacred cows allowed to run unimpeded in our culture, few are as revered as literacy. Its benefits have been so incontestable that in the five millennia since the advent of the written word numerous poets and writers have extolled it's virtues. Few paused to consider its costs. Sophocles once warned, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse." The invention of writing was vast; this book will investigate the curse.